A pretty damned terrific episode of Law and Order. Forget that the mystery aspect is good, but the characters are fascinating. It is a poetic look at a procedural – much like Zodiac, in how an unsolved crime can tear someone apart. Great supporting players, too. But the real win is the shocking long take at the film’s center.

I’ll be doing an in depth piece about this sequence on UGO next week – but when this film comes out in a few weeks, it is worth the price of admission alone.

This might sound simple, or obvious, but it is true: there’s an easy way to tell if a book is good. If you zip through it in undisturbed sessions and are done before you even realize, it is good. I’d been schlepping around a brick of a novel that I thought I was liking, but then I opened this up for kicks and next thing I knew, before I got up to pee or get a glass of water, I was on page 59.

Bad Marie, which’ll be in bookstores in mid-June, is the story of a woman of questionable ethics and responsibility. In real life, you’d hate her – but the world seen through her eyes makes her behavior strangely sympathetic. . .and appealing. There is something liberating in being with someone who is being bad – so reading this book is kinda like going out and getting drunk and doing things you aren’t supposed to do. It is probably very good for your mental hygiene to take this sort of trip once in a while.

This can act as Exhibit A when I argue that Green Lantern is actually nerdier than Star Trek.

A lattice of subspace networking is leading Interstellar spiders directly to the Guardians of the Universe’s power source. Yeah, deal with it. All four Green Lanterns of Earth are ultimately called in to aid, but not before Killowog and some noobs (like alien medical hottie Soranik Natu) get in on the action. Oh, and Black Holes, too.

Another topic I never want to see another documentary about is the early Internet prognosticator.

This documentary, however, is very well made. It is edge-of-your-seat filmmaking, taken from hours of video of nothing but people picking the lint out of their navel.

Give it a few hours and the effect will wear off. . . and everything that’s been presented to you as shocking revelation will seem incredibly obvious.

Maybe it’s just because I was around during the 1990s dotcom shenanigans, but I feel like this movie coulda been made a hundred different ways and, with the same editing and music, would seem equally “important.”

Just like you, I am sick to death about bio docs about famous artists made under the auspices of their children. There has been a tidal wave of these films, really, and it must freaking stop.

This one, though, I can’t deny, is actually pretty good. Because the star of the film is Dalton Trumbo’s writing – his letters, especially, read in monologue form by great actors like David Strathairn and Liam Neeson and others. So there.

Buy me a beer, though, and we’ll argue if the Hollywood blacklist actually took anyone’s first amendment rights from anyone. Where is it in the constitution that states that everyone has the right to make motion pictures distributed by for-profit organizations?

While I may have been a little carried away with my “A-” grade, I very much enjoyed Breck Eisner’s Crazies.

There is a four-issue comic that was collecting dust on my desk that I found actually did a good job of reminding me that, dammit, I liked this flick.

What’s funny is that the comic rounds out some of the story elements in the film that seemed glossed over. Which means they knew when their script was skipping over stuff (like why those guys in the pickup were killing people, or why there was a not-quite-dead guy with a sewn mouth in the hospital.) I like the fact that at some point after the final cut someone said, “we’ll stick that in a comic too explain it.”

I hope this becomes the new default instead of “we’ll put it in the DVD.”

We all love revisionist Westerns, but if it weren’t for square jaw pictures like this there’d be nothing to revise.

I went on a Wyatt Earp/Doc Holliday bender many years back (I can think of this and three other pics I saw of the top of my head) and I remember liking it a whole lot better that first time. Here it just seemed a little bit. . .ordinary.

I know, I’ve just offended everyone and lost gobs of credibility, but there it is.

With no Prime Directive no one’s gonna’ tell Captain Archer not to monkey with the hunting practices of a race that wants to kill sentient, shapeshifting thought-readers on a planet of endless night hurtling through space on an orbit-free course. So score one for tough-guy environmentalism.